George W Bush

One of the many drawbacks to being a lame-duck president, even a popular one, is that influence diminishes in direct proportion to political capital. It is a simple function of supply and demand, and it has reduced more than a few commanders in chief to the status of benchwarmers. George W. Bush is not a popular president. In fact, his personal favorability quotient falls somewhere between that of a hedge fund manager and your average bill collector. As the nominal standard bearer of the Republican Party, he has seen his power steadily erode as the presidential contest to succeed him ratchets up in the public mind.

1889: Montana became the 41st state. 1923: Adolf Hitler launched his first attempt at seizing power in Germany with a failed coup in Munich that came to be known as the Beer-Hall Putsch. 1932: New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover for the presidency. 1993: Kirkpatrick's Jewelry Store in downtown Aberdeen is quitting business after serving the region for 87 years. 2000: A statewide recount began in Florida, which emerged as critical in deciding the winner of the 2000 presidential election.

"... The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past.

It turns out that even the most paranoid among us were right to be afraid of what George W. Bush's White House and Justice Department were up to in the days and months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Last week the Justice Department declassified and released two memos and seven so-called legal opinions that, taken together, informed President Bush that, as a wartime chief executive, he had unfettered dictatorial powers. We already knew that Bush dispensed with the Fourth Amendment, suspended the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures and ordered warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of untold billions of e-mails and telephone calls to and from American citizens.

Here's how it is out there. Awhile back, I was at the self-checkout counter of a hardware store. A young man approached and offered to put my $20 purchase on his store gift card if I would give him $10 in cash. He said he had no money for gas. I let him put my purchase on his card, but I gave him the full amount back. It was the second time in a week I'd been asked by a stranger for help in filling the tank. And this was before last week's prediction of a spike in gas prices to $4 a gallon.

The applause has faded, but Bill Clinton continues to star on the airwaves in the wake of his widely praised defense of President Barack Obama's economic policies at the Democratic National Convention. The Obama campaign is showing a commercial in which the former president repeats his contention that no one could have fixed in just four years the economic mess the Republicans bequeathed. And rival Mitt Romney tried to undercut Clinton's impact with an ad displaying his criticism of Obama during wife Hillary's 2008 primary campaign.

Let's call it a tale of two responses. Results from a nationwide st udy of air emissions outside schools are complex enough that it's difficult to know who should do what next. The study, conducted by USA Today, includes statistics showing Yankton schools as among the worst nationwide in levels of toxic chemicals floating outside schools. And researchers who worked with the newspaper on another phase of the study say that further testing could be justified at Laura B. Anderson Elementary School in Sioux Falls.

So apparently, we're not allowed to talk about George W. Bush anymore. I found this out recently after opining in this space about a newspaper report documenting the use - actually, the uselessness - of Bush-approved torture on a supposed al-Qaida terrorist. In response came notes from a handful of Bush dead-enders that might fairly be summarized as follows: "He's been out of office over two whole months. Stop talking about him. You're living in the past. Move on. " You had to take it with the proverbial granule of salt since, as you'll recall, those folks weren't particularly receptive to people criticizing Bush when he was in office, either.

The past week was an eventful one for President Barack Obama, although not always in the way that he and his advisers might have intended. First there was the ill-fated photo opportunity with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, a man for whom baiting the supposedly imperialistic tendencies of the United States has become a full-time job. While we don't necessarily agree that shaking the hand of a dictator (albeit, a democratically elected one) automatically qualifies Obama as an ?appeaser,?

Second terms have rarely been kind to American presidents. Our last two-term leader, George W. Bush, ended his tenure with a financial crash so disastrous that his own party has tried to erase him from memory. Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, was more successful, but he still spent much of his second term enmeshed in a sex scandal and battling impeachment. Even our greatest modern presidents had rocky second terms: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan are all revered more for what they accomplished in their first four years than for their later acts.

Presidential challengers often do what Mitt Romney did this week, painting the incumbent's foreign policies in dire terms and promising major changes in emphasis and direction. The Republican nominee accused President Barack Obama of weak leadership in the Middle East, saying that, while he shares the president's "hopes for a safer, freer and a more prosperous Middle East allied with the United States ... hope is not a strategy. " But Romney never laid out a coherent strategy beyond the need to project U.S. strength and values, thus raising a question of whether he's advocating real changes or making political debating points in which any change is more rhetorical than real.

The applause has faded, but Bill Clinton continues to star on the airwaves in the wake of his widely praised defense of President Barack Obama's economic policies at the Democratic National Convention. The Obama campaign is showing a commercial in which the former president repeats his contention that no one could have fixed in just four years the economic mess the Republicans bequeathed. And rival Mitt Romney tried to undercut Clinton's impact with an ad displaying his criticism of Obama during wife Hillary's 2008 primary campaign.

1889: Montana became the 41st state. 1923: Adolf Hitler launched his first attempt at seizing power in Germany with a failed coup in Munich that came to be known as the Beer-Hall Putsch. 1932: New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover for the presidency. 1993: Kirkpatrick's Jewelry Store in downtown Aberdeen is quitting business after serving the region for 87 years. 2000: A statewide recount began in Florida, which emerged as critical in deciding the winner of the 2000 presidential election.

The past week was an eventful one for President Barack Obama, although not always in the way that he and his advisers might have intended. First there was the ill-fated photo opportunity with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, a man for whom baiting the supposedly imperialistic tendencies of the United States has become a full-time job. While we don't necessarily agree that shaking the hand of a dictator (albeit, a democratically elected one) automatically qualifies Obama as an ?appeaser,?

So apparently, we're not allowed to talk about George W. Bush anymore. I found this out recently after opining in this space about a newspaper report documenting the use - actually, the uselessness - of Bush-approved torture on a supposed al-Qaida terrorist. In response came notes from a handful of Bush dead-enders that might fairly be summarized as follows: "He's been out of office over two whole months. Stop talking about him. You're living in the past. Move on. " You had to take it with the proverbial granule of salt since, as you'll recall, those folks weren't particularly receptive to people criticizing Bush when he was in office, either.

It turns out that even the most paranoid among us were right to be afraid of what George W. Bush's White House and Justice Department were up to in the days and months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Last week the Justice Department declassified and released two memos and seven so-called legal opinions that, taken together, informed President Bush that, as a wartime chief executive, he had unfettered dictatorial powers. We already knew that Bush dispensed with the Fourth Amendment, suspended the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures and ordered warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of untold billions of e-mails and telephone calls to and from American citizens.

The first time I met George W. Bush, and the only time I talked to him one-on-one, was in 1993, the year before he was elected governor of Texas. We met in Arlington, when Bush was a high-profile executive with the Texas Rangers baseball team and I was a Fort Worth Star-Telegram business reporter. I interviewed him for a profile story on Rusty Rose, a well-known Dallas investor who shared equal rank with Bush as co-managing general partner of the Rangers. I didn't envision Bush getting elected governor, much less president.

Let's call it a tale of two responses. Results from a nationwide st udy of air emissions outside schools are complex enough that it's difficult to know who should do what next. The study, conducted by USA Today, includes statistics showing Yankton schools as among the worst nationwide in levels of toxic chemicals floating outside schools. And researchers who worked with the newspaper on another phase of the study say that further testing could be justified at Laura B. Anderson Elementary School in Sioux Falls.

One thing we will give the Bush administration credit for is consistency. George W. Bush has consistently pressed for greater authority and for more secrecy. A few months ago, perhaps worried that any new watchdog might start uncovering unsavory secrets, President Bush moved against open government by transferring an ombudsman program intended to mediate disclosure disputes in government from the National Archives, a relatively benign government office, to the Department of Justice which is, you guessed it, under the control of the administration.